This Century
by Absol Master
Summary: The crown princess must take her throne, a boy must inherit a legend too vast for him, and a dragon must learn the sky. Death must be written over, because the story is starting again. Oneshot.


I blame my hiatus on the coming 'A' levels. I finally got round to catching up on the storyline this week (bad time to be doing so, if you ask me), and this is my direct response.

Just a little something that leapt out of me at the strangest time (and by that I mean 3 am in the morning). Not much plot or significance, just a series of thoughts and dialogues at a certain point in time. Not meant to be a serious piece either, because I know I've written way better. I just needed...to...write...

MapleSEA spellings are used where there is divergence. And if there are incongruencies with the canon...I am sorry. I'm not fully knowledgeable about all the storylines yet. I guess I'd appreciate corrections...

* * *

THIS CENTURY

_How does it feel_, she muses. The thought plods across her mind like a dark beast, churning up the tracks in her mind. Her eyes linger faintly on the lights of the town down among the knolls, but everything smells like farmland where she is—the goodly scent of earthy wheat, the less friendly odours. It isn't much of a question—not so much as it is a plea, that is. How does it feel.

To bury your last breath in a child. To encase a dynasty's vestige in a blue eggshell.

It could have been anything else, she realises now as she counts off the many times Luck could have exercised more frugality with them. A twist of fate would have smashed to pieces the brittle life inside. Sad way to see a Dragon's gift go, so lovingly shaped by divine blood and claw, rendered futile in a flash of chorion and skyblue shards. It could have been a Black Wing who'd gotten there first. And then goodbye to the Onyx Dragons, forever—rulers once and rulers no more.

A death in a shattering of shell and stained gold-trimmed sable capes and a bleeding foetus: that wouldn't have been pretty. Not in the least.

Not to disrespect her dear friend, of course. Though the prisoning has been long and the anaesthesia of magic numbing, she can barely rip from her memory the tumult of their stormy last seconds together.

_And his last seconds breathing,_she realises, for the first time.

The knowledge does not strike her as gut-wrenchingly as she'd have thought it would. It is merely painful, and the ache has finally begun to gnaw away at the senselessness in her heart that is a century of cold trapping itself in her elven blood.

It's been such a long sleep. It is strange, somewhat, that her bedchamber changed so little in a century. The dresser is the same immaculate wood, not jerked an inch out of place. Perhaps some of the artifacts upon it have shifted about, like game pieces, but she will never know the perpetrator of the shifting.

As it turns out from this short venture in search of the egg, though, everything outside her room has seen time's wear. Everything has grown out against it, too, the way trees heal new layers of bark over wounds, pretend they never were there before. Her people are quiet and safe—perhaps a little bolder, a little braver. They no longer speak of stringing harps as much as they do of stringing bows. She imagines this is a healing—an advance, not a regression. A hundred years have left an eternal lesson.

Her journey has yielded much else. All across her homeland, the landscape has transformed. Roads have faded from use as old villages have closed their gates. Town borders have shifted, receding in places, pushing forth at others, like vast living creatures roaming the land. The Lesser Forest has shrunk away from the Greater at Victoria's heart, as if afraid of it.

She did not expect that a town named Henesys would spring up so close to the egg, nor that a farm would near engulf that old grove. A village among the hills, which knows nothing of the centuries of blood upon which it stands—blood which has seeped into and stained the foundations just below the paving stones.

Lifting her eyes to the sky above the town, she shifts onto her feet—quietly, so she does not wake the sleeping boy beside her.

Ah, the silly farm boy, the one who fell inside _their _story by accident. He should know better than to keep treasures he doesn't understand. Like any child, he dozes even louder than the lady elf rustles the grass, occasionally mumbling something or other about syrup and hotcakes and shearing sheep.

In a corner of the farm no one ever visits, Evan lies curled around a shape even smaller than himself—a hapless black creature, damp and scaly and so motionless you might think it dead. Both of them are exhausted. Perhaps confused dizzy.

Silly, unlucky little boy. He can never begin to imagine the magnificence of the story he has just been thrust into headfirst.

The elf queen blinks, bitterness twining cold around her heart. It's the end of his life as he knows it. He isn't the innocent farm boy who rakes hay for his dad any longer. He must—he _will_—become the hero now.

The world prays he will, because the dark is awakening.

The little dragon has already decided that, without deciding at all—the tiny, silly dragon, last of Afrien's kin, has imprinted on Evan. Evan, who will become Freud. Though he can never truly hope to, for Freud will never live again.

Mercedes takes the interlude of a breeze to wonder upon her old friends—dear Aran of the snows, who has slept a hundred years in the ice he always thought a faithful friend; elusive Phantom, too—that thief who's always been no more than a paper mask; and Luminous, whom in a second might have followed Freud into the night.

She wonders if this was a fair trade with heaven, victory for death. Starker than anything the ice prison could hope to numb away, Mercedes remembers their very final seconds in the shattering temple—fires waltzing with shadows across a ballroom floor of chaos, and wings ripped by bolts as a dark shape tumbled screaming from the sky, all lit aflame like the Goddess' torch. Extinguished by the time they'd completed their fall.

They were glorious, Freud and Afrien.

All that remains of them, now, is a fragment of tale, waiting to be seeded again in this innocent boy and in the tiny winged creature he embraces.

* * *

There are graves in the world for the great Dragon Mage, yes, in the eyes of the people and the beasts, in the bends of rivers where Afrien once bowed to drink, on rocks broken by claws where white lilies have sprouted in the spring.

* * *

Nineheart and the Cygnus Knights sip tea together in Empress Cygnus' courtyard. Cygnus has a fine collection of china, really, and she isn't afraid to leave it out for daily use. As intricate as the arches in the garden, or the story they have chosen to become part of.

Dear Empress Cygnus, who was only precious Crown Princess Cygnus a hundred years ago—pretty girl in braids and puff skirts and crinolines, playing with gems on the steps to the throne.

Though Aria by all means should have stayed, pristine and immortal. The only way an Empress may die is at the hands of another.

"There's something of an elaborate asceticism to Kiriyu's art consciousness," Nineheart murmurs over the rim of his teacup. "Paradoxical, yet—or thus—quite astounding, how he has struck that balance."

"Our weapons dealer?" mutters Hawkeye, bleary from his nap. "He did all these artsy things?"

"Kiriyu the _First_," answers Mihail with a look that never fails to make Ickhart roll his eyes and Irina sigh. "It is quite lovely, the delicacy with which he wrought the steel."

"Is it steel?" questions the tactician, and swirls his tea. "I quite imagine the creature had classier tastes."

"It was made on Her Late Majesty's commission, and I have heard she drew the patterns herself," the Dawn Warrior's contribution is surprising to some. "It makes me wonder what she'd have become, if not the Empress of the world."

They don't normally toast to night and day like this, as if the ivory tower could blind them to the darkness stirring somewhere at the corner of the world. They are very much aware and astute, the Knights of Cygnus.

But Nineheart seems to think the meditative activity necessary, perhaps _because _of their astuteness, not in spite of it.

Oz glances off, buttered scone on her saucer. "Where _is_Cygnus, anyway?" she says. The late afternoon lifts her words away to where the tinos roost. "She's late. She's always late these days!"

"It should not bother us," answers Irina. "The monarch alone decides when she is late. But she _has_seemed detached recently…"

"You mean, more detached than usual," their resident Thunder Breaker mutters. "She's always been an airy one—"

"And she is your empress, and you owe her every last dredge of your respect, scrappy as it is," Nineheart manages to snap without seeming angry, only querulous.

That white hair _must_ have something to do with mental age, everyone decides simultaneously. Whatever questions hung upon the air, about the silent thing that has been troubling Empress Cygnus, or the absence that seems to gleam in that empty saucer at the table's head, disperses like a puff of dandelion parachutes. They're sipping their tea again, before anyone knows it, and the teacups persist in their prettiness, and the arches continue to be elaborately ascetic, and Cygnus does not appear.

* * *

She rests her palms upon Shinsoo's feathers. And for a moment she finds it strange that a beast this enormous has feathers so satin-soft.

"They have…awakened?" she clarifies softly, hoping the answer that returns is _no,_or even _what makes you think they have?_and the wind billows her hair out in a whirl that would quite stun her knights—or those, at least, who comprehend the beauty of gold so pure.

But the Divine Bird hums her answer, and it is not the one Cygnus wanted. _"They are searching, yes—searching for each other, for the bloodline of their Empress, for allies, for friends, for enemies. You are only a residue of_their_mistress, after all—a continuation of an endless tale. "_

A brief uncertainty flits like a storm across her gaze. The heroes will not be searching unless they know there is something to be found.

Cygnus' gaze wavers to the white grass flowers by Shinsoo's great resting head.

There are times she wishes she were but a temporal flower, for though they live scarce days, no one hates them. They die free of reason.

"It has been—so long," whispers the empress, glancing at her fingertips and the feathers among which they nest. "We all knew the Darkness was not to be incarcerated permanently… I only wish this did not portend war."

This fear for war is perhaps more_—despairing_ than it should be. Her fear has been a reason for many things: the reason she has gathered a vast army, the reason for the construction of walls of magic about her island. She says it is to save her people, but all of it, really, has been to protect her fragile flower of a heart.

But it cannot be blamed upon the divine Empress, can it, this seeming selfish lie that would be sin upon the lips of any other?

It is difficult, after all, when you are immortal, and the only way you may die is at the hands of another.

War is brutality amplified by cold tacticians' quills scratching on parchment. She fears the siege and the breaking of the walls. She fears it so, the Darkness that stole her aunt way, the darkness that has haunted her since she was Crown Princess.

Playing with gems on the steps to the throne.

* * *

It is difficult, most of all, when you are immortal, and there are thousands who want you dead.

* * *

The morning is thickened, softened, by mist from over the hills. Henesys doesn't normally see mist like this; it's as if the Goddess wishes to hide something from the eyes of some other omniscient being.

The little farm on the outskirts is not spared the white blanket of this turn of the weather. Barely four o'clock in the morning, but the roosters have begun to awaken, choked by the dewy air and cackling their fright into the night so people think it's already dawn.

"Mir," says Evan, testing the name upon that tongue. "Mir is an oddly old name, now, isn't it? Who named him?"

It pleases Mercedes that the boy is adroit. "Why, you did," she replies wryly, "in your sleep."

His brow furrows in confusion. "I dreamt of flying in my sleep," he says, scrabbling at the ground to straighten himself.

It _is_ true, that while he was having his soaring sleep, Evan did speak that single word unto the baby dragon.

But it is also true, very true, that it was the last word Freud ever whispered in that dark forest grove, as _he _was falling into his own perpetual sleep. The name with which he christened the helpless egg, as he was nestling it in the embrace of a glorious tree.

It is true as well that Mercedes never once spoke that name to Evan.

The boy stares down at the creature, just as it is stirring, beating out the wings it doesn't quite have. "I imagine Dad won't be happy about there being a predator laying eggs on his farm," he mutters. "He'll think an infestation's about to start."

"And I imagine," whispers she, "that the Cygnus Knights are laughing at us now. Some _allies _we'd make to them. You barely respect the dragon who's imprinted on you, and he's going to be tethered to you for the next hundred years."

In answer, Mir mewls—or gurgles, or something suchlike—with a cock of his infantile head.

Mercedes sighs in response. It will be a long time.

A crackle of twigs ascends from the trees ten feet away. They watch as swallows take off from the boughs, scared by something hardly bigger than they, perhaps no bigger at all. Mir's great golden eyes are as captivated by the swallows as they are by him.

Someday Mir must learn to fly too, and that day, Evan can no longer be innocent.

Their little dragon twists on the grass, slipping and falling upon his back.

"Will Mir become one of those big dragons from the books?" asks the farm boy then. "I've read things about them, Ma used to tell stories about the dragons who circled in the sky, and made nests in the cliffs across the ocean. Are they true? Is Mir one of them?"

Something about his wide-eyed wonder nearly breaks her. "They weren't just in books," she answers. "And yes. Mir will be a sight to behold, believe me."

Mercedes does not mention that this could take years. Is Mir one of the fast-growing ones? A pity, really, if the very last Onyx Dragon breathing upon this world is a runt. Coughing sparks without lighting flames. That'd be such a shame.

Evan scrabbles through dirt and hay, and stands with some effort—he isn't quite tall, just as Mir isn't quite big. "Who are you, anyway, Madam Elf?" he asks. "Are you a part of all this strange Mir business? Are you from the stories too?"

The words are surprising in their own way. With a toss of her head, she sweeps a curl of hair behind her ear. His eyes grow very wide—he must recognize those ears, now, ears of the elves who only speak with men when times are at their most dire.

Times must be dire, Evan realises now. They are on the brink of momentous change. They are about to be swept away on a tide of time. This he suddenly knows—and his blithe, ignorant innocence has at last begun to thaw away.

"Yes," she whispers. "More than you think."

* * *

It looks like the start of a chapterfic...but is not. I suppose.


End file.
